Google and HashiCorp announce expanded open source collaboration

HashiCorp

Google and HashiCorp just announced an expanded collaboration, a move aimed at making it easier for people to take advantage of the features of HashiCorp products while also making optimal use of Google Cloud Platform features and capabilities. The two entities have provided integrations and support since 2013. But now they’re expanding that collaboration. This is the latest example of Google’s recent teaming up with other companies to offer open source tools for GCP users.

There are a lot of potential benefits for developers, operators, and security professionals in using HashiCorp’s open source tools alongside GCP tools, especially now that Google is expanding support in HashiCorp products. Here are some of the areas where you might notice changes thanks to the new expanded collaboration.

Cloud provisioning from Google and HashiCorp

With the Google Cloud provider for HashiCorp Terraform, you can manage a broad array of GCP resource types, including recent additions like Bigtable and BigQuery. HashiCorp has also announced support for GCP in the Terraform Module Registry, giving users easier access to templates for setting up and running their GCP based infrastructure. The two companies also plan on expanding the number of GCP services that can be provisioned with Terraform. This means that Terraform users can adopt a familiar workload across multiple cloud and on-premises environments.

Cloud security

Google and HashiCorp are also working to strengthen the integrations between HashiCorp Vault and GCP. This means that Vault authentication backends for IAM and signed VM metadata will be supported. HashiCorp is also working to support Kubernetes authentication.

Users also now have access to two different authentication backends that they can use to validate a service’s identity in Vault. The first option involves GCP IAM service accounts, which allows you to use an existing IAM identity to authenticate to Vault. And the second involves using Google Compute Engine instance identity tokens to authenticate using an instance’s signed metadata.

Since these are open source products, Google and HashiCorp are also interested in feedback and user innovations.